I happened upon an audiophile thought during an anthropology lecture in the auditorium. I imagined a high end recording device that primarily recorded audio but also had a 360 degree camera lens affixed to it, enabling it to gauge its position in the auditorium with respect to surrounding objects. the user would record for the desired length of time, then plug the microphone/camera into a pc via a usb port or something similar, and compatible software would load a screen representative of what the camera lens on the microphone saw. Now then, a nice right-pointing “play” arrow would allow the captured sequence to play out in real time, and so far you might think this is nothing more than what a video camera can do, but here’s where it gets into speculation territory: say you’re into sampling random strange noises for purposes of using the sounds in post-techno music. Well, if you happen to hear one such sound while the recorded sequence is playing out and you want to isolate it for sampling purposes, you can. Since the microphone knows where it is with respect to other objects, and it’s directional, it can locate the source of the sound based on these factors plus the sound’s intensity. The user would highlight the area near the origin of the sound and play back the sequence. This time the sounds originating from the highlighted area would play back louder. Minor touch up work could then be carried out, such as erasing the undesired sounds and white noise.